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Saturday, January 11, 2014

pallet wood USA map.

Several months ago I decided to tackle the landing on our open staircase. This big huge empty wall was just glaring at us. There was a lot of brainstorming and some really great ideas. I finally settled on two pallet wood projects. This is the first.

1. It started with a large USA map. (found this one on sale at a teacher store)

2. I cut out the map. Tiny baby nail scissors worked great for the tiny details (inlets, bays, etc.)

3. The bonus: The part cut-out above I will use for a future playroom project. I really just need the outline in the bottom picture for this project.

4. Score some free pallet wood somewhere. If my husband sees good pieces around he brings them home for me from time to time. It's like my version of a bouquet of flowers.

5. Pull apart all of the pieces from the pallets. Pull out any long nails.

6. Pick pieces and put together the pieces how you want. It's a bit of a puzzle. I laid them out on the garage floor, made sure the size was fitting for the size on the wall/ I wanted a random look, so I laid pieces out and then drew lines where I wanted the cuts to be done. You can see the edges do not match up perfectly.

7. Attach a few pieces (3 vertically on the back for support).

8. Tape on map outline.

9. Sponge paint lightly (I used leftover white paint from a board and batten project.). I wanted a lighter paint look so it still had that rustic look without big heavy paint on it.

10. It takes all of about 5 minutes to paint. Then I chose to place a heart over where we live.

11. Allow some time to dry.
12. Figure out how you would like to hang the pallet on the wall. (It is heavy). We have been big fans of the Hangman picture hanging devices with levels included. A bracket is attached to the wall and one attached to the piece of art, and then you hang the brackets on top of each other. They can hold up to 100lbs. We used them for all of our headboards.

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﻿Voila!

After we hung the pallet on the wall, my husband also secured a few extra screws just to make sure it is safely in place (we don't want these babies falling).

I forgot to say, we made another pallet wood exactly the same size to be placed below the USA map one. More to come as that one gets finished up soon (it definitely already has a plan).

After we finished this project and hung these up, I immediately turned to my husband and said "How awesome would it have been to plank the entire wall!?" (I love textured accent walls.) I'm sure you can imagine the eye roll that followed. :)